A Portal for Your Thoughts

by Jeffrey M. Poole

  Standing as still as statues, concealed in the heavy foliage of a nearby tree, stood five diminutive figures. Tools and weapons softly clinked together as each of the five, standing in close proximity to one another, turned to look at their companions. Each of them was wearing highly decorated ornamental robes covered with emblems, insignias, and various medals.

  “Did everyone see what I just did?” one dwarf finally spoke.

  Four heads nodded in unison.

  “Are you as dumbfounded as I am?”

  The dwarves all nodded again.

  “What does it mean?” the dwarf asked no one in particular.

  “It means we have a lot to think about,” a second dwarf softly intoned.

  Chapter 13 – Rotten to the Core

  The room was spinning. No matter how many times she tried to concentrate, no matter how many times she blinked her eyes to clear her vision, the walls of her room kept circling dizzily about her. Why couldn’t she think straight? Where was she? What had happened?

  Sarah remained motionless, staring at the peels of paint curling in multiple places on the ceiling above. Maybe if she rested here for a few moments her dizziness would pass? So she waited. And waited. Then she waited a few minutes more. Nothing changed. It felt as though she was lying flat on her back on a spinning carousel and she had no idea how to get off. She hadn’t felt this woozy since she had mistakenly taken some NyQuil after she had already downed a strong allergy medicine last year. She had been so groggy then that it had taken a full two days of rest and recovery before she felt well enough to get out of bed. What she was feeling now, she decided, was just as bad, if not worse.

  A headache had formed and was hammering mercilessly away inside her skull. She pressed her hands against her temples and closed her eyes, moaning softly. Thankfully she was spared from getting a full migraine, but what she was experiencing now had to be a close cousin.

  She gave herself a few more minutes, taking deep gulps of air, before she opened her eyes and tried again. For the time being the room had stopped spinning but a new problem had presented itself: the floor. She would swear the floor had at least a 45° tilt to it. There was no way she was going to try and walk across that. Not yet, anyway. After a few nausea-inducing attempts she managed to pull herself into an upright sitting position.

  The room she was in was no better than a cell. She was sitting on a dusty cot with a threadbare blanket stretched across it. In the far corner of the room was a simple wooden chair that looked like it had at one time been a rocker but had long since been drafted for another purpose. There was one narrow window, about two feet wide and half that tall, situated way up near the ceiling on her left. Sure enough she could see that the narrow window had four bars stretching across it. Why, she didn’t know, as there was no way she could reach it, let alone squeeze through it.

  Sarah turned her attention to the door. It was iron, had a small metal grate right about where she expected a peephole to be, and looked quite formidable. There was no keyhole that she could see, which meant that it had to be unlocked from the other side. That could mean only one thing: she was a prisoner.

  It was time to get out of here.

  She knew she was capable of taking care of herself and getting herself to safety; however, thanks to the jumbled state her mind was in, she didn’t have the foggiest idea how she could do it. She knew without a doubt that she had faced worse obstacles than this; yet the solution to this predicament eluded her.

  “Magic,” Sarah mumbled, dismayed to discover her mouth was bone dry. She could really use a drink of water. “I can use magic to get out of here.”

  She sat perfectly still as she tried to collect her thoughts. Why was it so hard to think? She had magic. This she also knew. Why couldn’t she remember what…

  Teleporting. That was it. She could teleport. Easy enough. All she had to do was bring up an image of where she wanted to go and with a proverbial wiggle of her nose, she could… Sarah hesitated. She had never alluded to her ability as being equivalent to that of a certain nose wiggle. That would infer some part of her consciousness thought she was a witch. Wouldn’t Steve get a kick out of that?

  Steve!

  Sarah’s eyes cleared, but only for a moment. Where was Steve? Why wasn’t he coming to save her?

  Because he didn’t have to, a little part of brain managed to squeak out before the thought became lost in the chaos her mind had become. You can take care of yourself. Besides, he’s stuck on Lentari. You dropped him off there.

  Sarah nodded, then groaned, bringing a fresh wave of nausea. Steve was in Lentari. There was no way he was going to be able to rescue her from another world. In fact, the only way she was going to be able to see him again was if she found a way to teleport away from this horrid place and fetch him back.

  Sarah’s eyes opened. The rendezvous. The meeting! How long had it been? Wasn’t this the second day he’d been gone? That meant she needed to get to Lentari to bring him back. Without her he’d never be able to make it back. She had to escape. Her husband’s life depended on it!

  She groaned again and tried to squeeze the life out of her headache by pressing in on her own temples. She could get out of this mess. She just had to regain her teleporting abilities. But once she had them, where should she go?

  Sarah tried to visualize one of her safe zones. She thought of the Silver Spike and readied herself. However, her erratic thoughts wouldn’t let her picture the saloon she knew so well. She couldn’t get an image to form, let alone latch on to it long enough to teleport.

  Sarah hesitated. Now that she was becoming more alert her other senses began reporting in. Her taste buds were telling her that she could detect the faint taste of poppyseeds. What had she to eat today? For that matter, what day was it?

  Try as she might, her short term memory refused to cooperate.

  She slowly stood and braced herself on the closest wall. Waiting for the room to stop lurching about she fixated on the door directly in front of her. She had taken a few hesitant steps towards the exit when she realized she wasn’t going to make it without falling over. She summoned every ounce of her strength left and leapt towards the door, latching onto the door handle and holding on as though her life depended on it.

  The room was still swaying as much as a ship being tossed about in a storm but she was at least able to keep her feet. Maintaining her death grip on the handle, she used her other hand to pound on the door. She shouted for someone, anyone, to let her out but she received no response. In fact, the only thing she accomplished was to anger the headache gods even further. Her headache quickly approached meltdown status and she reluctantly let go of the door to stumble back to the bed.

  She sat down so hard on the cot that a cloud of dust flew up and tickled her nose. The cot’s small head and foot board, able to fold flat for storage, both thunked down in an angry protest of the violent treatment it had received. Sarah stared at the cot a few moments before automatically swinging her legs up onto the bed and stretching out. Perhaps a small nap would help clear her senses.

  She hadn’t realized she had fallen asleep until she heard someone clear their throat. It had been loud. Abrasively loud. Whoever made that sound must be suffering from some type of illness.

  Sarah’s eyes opened. Someone was in the room with her? She slowly turned her head and flicked her eyes across the tiny room. There, casually sitting in the chair with one leg carelessly draped over the other, was a middle-aged man that Sarah guessed was in his mid fifties. He was wearing a freshly pressed white button-down long sleeve shirt, blue trousers, and black boots stretching up to just below his knees. His white hair was cropped short and he had an iron-gray handlebar mustache.

  He neither smiled nor frowned at her. His expression was completely neutral. He was studying her, Sarah realized. How long had he been there?

  “Ah. You’re awake.”

  “Who… who are you?”

  “Sheriff Marcus Bixby. You may call me ‘Sheriff�
��.”

  Sarah tried to wet her lips but found that her mouth was too dry.

  “Could I have some water?”

  The sheriff shrugged. “Certainly.”

  He raised a cane Sarah hadn’t noticed and banged once on the door. A moment later the door cracked open and a tousle headed young man appeared.

  “Fetch the lady some water.”

  The young man nodded and disappeared. The sheriff, clearly intent on watching Sarah, remained silent as he waited for the water. Once Sarah had quenched her thirst she turned to face the sheriff.

  “What have you done to me? Did you give me something?”

  The sheriff gave her a smug smile.

  “You could say that.”

  “Why?”

  “All in good time, darlin’.”

  “I’m not your darling,” Sarah angrily protested. She still had her headache and still felt nauseated and dizzy.

  “You are now, darlin’. Words cannot begin to describe how excited I am to see you here.”

  “What? Why would you say that? I don’t even know you.”

  “But I know you, darlin’.”

  Sarah automatically shook her head and winced. She seriously needed to make a concentrated effort not to provoke the headache gods any further than she already had.

  “There’s no way you could know me. I can’t… I don’t… Why can’t I think straight? What have you done to me?”

  The sheriff gave her a patronizing look before he smiled at her.

  “Let’s just say that I gave you a little something to help you feel better.”

  “You drugged me?”

  “You could say that.”

  “I did say that. Would you say that?”

  “Oh, you need some clarification? Sure thing, darlin’. You’ve been drugged.”

  “Why? With what?”

  “Psychoactive drugs are somewhat hard to come by in these parts, I will admit. It cost me a pretty penny, but I did find a supplier in San Francisco willing to ship me what I need, when I need it.”

  “What did you give me?”

  “Just a little somethin’ to help you relax.”

  “I don’t want to relax. I want to get out of here.”

  “I’m sure you do, darlin’. However, that won’t be possible.”

  “You can’t keep me here.”

  “Let’s agree to disagree, darlin’.”

  “Stop calling me ‘darling’.”

  “I’ll do whatever I want whenever I want to do it, darlin’,” the sheriff snapped out, his smug demeanor vanishing in an instant. “There ain’t nobody in this damn town that can tell me what to do. I call all the shots, you hear me? If I want you to do somethin’ then you damn-well better do it. You understand me, darlin’?”

  “Who are you?” Sarah demanded. She elected to remain sitting as she didn’t trust her legs yet. “What is it you want of me?”

  The sheriff slowly rose to his feet. Something about his blasé attitude annoyed her but she decided against saying anything. Until she could regain all her mental faculties, she didn’t dare try to provoke him. Not yet, anyway.

  “I am an ambitious man, darlin’,” Sheriff Marcus began, hooking a thumb in his front pocket and lifting a booted foot to rest on the chair he had just vacated. “I’ve been in this town for over twenty five years. Twenty five years! Can you even begin to imagine what this town was like back then? You’ve seen it now. Trust me, it wasn’t worth spit back then, not that it’s worth that now.”

  Sarah stared at the sheriff with partially glazed eyes. Sleep was threatening to overtake her once more but she was determined to learn more about her captor. There was something about him… she couldn’t place her finger on it.

  “War had broken out,” the sheriff was saying. “Who was the enemy? Foreigners? Invaders? No. The North was fighting the South. Did the people around here care? Not one damn bit. Life moves on, darlin’. No one cared about this little backwater town and that’s the way I preferred it. Then the gold rush started and people swarmed into California. This territory was essentially overlooked. So what drove the people here, do you think?”

  Sarah sensed the sheriff wouldn’t continue until she answered.

  “I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?”

  “Silver. A silver strike is what happened. Overnight my town tripled in size. It annoyed the hell outta me.” The sheriff looked at her and smiled lecherously at her. “The people who were willing to put in an honest day’s work managed to scrape together a few dollars of profit from their mines. I ain’t no miner, darlin’. I don’t want to be no miner, yet there were a few people who struck it rich. That was the key. That’s what I needed: a producing mine.”

  Sarah blinked a few times. Why was he telling her this? Had he found a mine and killed the former owner? How had this man ever become an officer of the law?

  “So there I was,” the sheriff drawled, clearly enjoying the attention he thought Sarah was giving him. “I legally bought a mine that some damn fool had let default. I had no idea if there was any silver, but if there was then it was mine. How, then, could I get it without having to do the work? Then it came to me. Let someone else do the work. Genius, ain’t it? I started a rumor that the mine had been abandoned after the owner had been killed in a freak accident. I let slip that a rich vein of silver supposedly ran in the area. The mine was simply waiting for the right person to work it.

  “It worked. People started swarming the area. Everyone wanted to take a crack at my new mine. They figured if they slipped in under the cover of nightfall they could strike it rich and be off before anyone would know. Well, I knew. I was waiting. I caught them red-handed. They were guilty of claim jumping and they knew it. I confiscated their haul and pocketed the earnings. Why not? I was the rightful owner of the mine. What they found was mine. With the proceeds from the Crusty Gulch mine I then...”

  Sarah’s mind wandered as the sheriff droned on. For the first time in a long while she was genuinely concerned. While the sheriff prattled on and on about how he needed to find a way to make his operation as profitable as possible without doing a lick of work, Sarah used every ounce of her willpower to quell the chaos in her head. Her thoughts were so jumbled that they refused to stay on one topic long enough to form a coherent thought. No wonder she couldn’t bring up a mental vision so she could teleport.

  What had the sheriff given her? If it was a drug then all she had to do was be certain she didn’t take any more. Was he tainting the food? Maybe the water? For that matter, did she remember actually eating or drinking anything besides the water she had just been given? She nervously eyed the glass of clear liquid she was still holding. She had to clear her mind.

  She tried deep cleansing breaths. No change. She tried to focus on her husband. She missed Steve. She wished he was by her side. He’d deal with that pompous sheriff. Steve would be able to shut him up.

  “How else could I earn a living once they dried up?” the sheriff continued to drawl. “So I hired a few local boys and then we… want to know what we did next?”

  Sarah tried to tune him out again. The pompous jerk wasn’t even looking at her. For whatever reason, the narrow window in the room had attracted his attention. The sheriff had clasped both hands behind his back as he regaled her with his story as though he was addressing an auditorium full of people. He had paused, as if expecting an answer. What was it he had just said? That’s right. Something about hiring some guys and asking her what they did next. How in the world did any of this concern her?

  “I suppose you’re going to tell me,” Sarah sighed.

  “Of course, darlin’. Now, where was I? That’s right. How was I supposed to make a living? The mines I had bought ran dry. I needed capital. Then I realized something. It was all around me. This city’s life blood is silver. People staked claims everywhere. You couldn’t walk a hundred feet in this town without stumbling across someone’s discovery marker. What you gotta realize, darlin’, is that in orde
r to stake a claim you must file a mining certificate with the Kootenai county recorder’s office, which just so happens to be located in this very town. And you know what? It’s the damnedest thing. Those certificates have a tendency to be filled out incorrectly or just end up being misplaced.”

  “You paid off the clerk, didn’t you? You’ve been cheating people out of their claims.”

  “It ain’t my fault this town has so many idiots in it.”

  “You admit you’re a claim jumper?”

  “If I see a piece of land that I’d like to stake a claim to then, to keep things legal, I investigate the land to see if anyone else has staked a claim to that chunk of land. And if they have then I do some discreet investigations at the recorder’s office to see if all the paperwork is in order. Seems I have a knack for finding unclaimed land or claims with missing certificates. Fair’s fair, darlin’.”

  Sarah frowned. “But… but…”

  “What about the previous owners, you ask? A good question, darlin’.”

  Sarah glowered. Sheriff Marcus glanced over his shoulder at her.

  “There are a surprising number of mines that aren’t properly staked. As I said, if the recorder don’t have no certificate on file for your plot o’ land then someone else is free to stake a claim of their own. Many a prospector’s been run outta town for filing incorrect or incomplete paperwork. This city has rules, darlin’.”

  Sarah glared at the back of his head, contempt written all over her face.

  “With that being said, let me ask you somethin’, darlin’. What’s the meanin’ of life? Do you know?”

  Sarah was silent as she plotted what she was going to do with the sheriff once she was in full control of her jhorun again.

  “Don’t worry your pretty little head if you don’t know it, darlin’. I’ll tell you. The secret to life is happiness. So, the question becomes what does it take to attain true happiness?”